A new facsimile machine has been developed which is relatively large and stands on the floor. The machine was designed to include a document-scanning section and a document-printing section. For optimum packaging and industrial design of the entire machine, the scanner occupies the upper portion of the machine, and the printer occupies the lower portion, so that finished documents appear at a low level in the machine after the message has been printed thereon. Documents fed out at such a low level in the machine are inconvenient and uncomfortable for an operator to collect and handle. To bring the documents to a higher level, they must be fed vertically and collected in a tray, and these operations are not easy to perform with thin sheets of paper.
The present invention solves this problem by feeding documents from the bottom of the machine onto a tray which is in a generally upright orientation and at a suitable elevation above the bottom of the machine. The feed apparatus and tray include features which stiffen the sheets of paper and thus facilitate the feeding operation.